Indian duo perplexes attacks investigators

NEWARK, N.J. (AP)  They worked 12-hour days at the Newark Penn Station newsstand, selling newspapers to commuters headed to the World Trade Center and other Manhattan destinations.

They ate fast food for lunch, downed cold beers at quitting time and went home to a dingy apartment in Jersey City, where they cooked dinner on an ancient stove and watched action movies. Like many other immigrants they sent money home, to India.

Then, a day after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, Mohammed Jaweed Azmath and Ayub Ali Khan ended up in Texas, having traveled nearly 1,600 miles in two days by airliner and train. Their luggage contained $5,600, an assortment of passports and box-cutting knives similar to those believed to have been the terrorist hijackers' weapon of choice.

When confronted by police looking for drug couriers, they appeared nervous. Azmath volunteered: "I did not have anything to do with New York."

Their story is one of the most intriguing and perplexing to come out of worldwide investigation of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

They remain in federal custody, held as material witnesses but not charged with any crime.

Law enforcement officials won't comment publicly about their case. But officials familiar with the investigation, speaking on condition of anonymity, have repeatedly placed Azmath and Khan among a handful of people who are under the most intense scrutiny but are not cooperating with investigators.

A man who shared their apartment, Mohammad Aslam Pervez, was charged last month with lying to investigators about more than $100,000 in transfers into and out of his bank account.

On Sept. 11, Azmath and Khan boarded a TWA airliner at Newark International Airport, bound for San Antonio. Friends had offered them jobs in Texas, Khan's brother, Mohammed Zahir Shah, said in Hyderabad.

When flights were grounded after the hijackings that morning, Khan and Azmath landed in St. Louis.

They paid cash for Amtrak tickets to San Antonio, and that alerted police, who thought they might be drug couriers. Their train stopped in Fort Worth on Sept. 12, and officers found Azmath and Khan asleep.

After the men consented to a search, police found box cutters, clothing and hair dye, plus Muslim religious items.

Investigators also noticed that the pair's bodies were shaved.

A day earlier, investigators searching the luggage of suspected hijacker Mohamed Atta had found what appeared to be instructions for the suicide hijackers. Excerpts released by the Justice Department included this instruction: "The previous night, shave the extra hair from the body (and) pray."